[UA] God and Danielewski

[holycrow at mindspring.com]

ua at lists.uchicago.edu wrote:
> On Mon, 11 June 2001, Royal Minister of Stuff wrote:
> 
> Actually, by the count I'm doing, the people who did
> ring in were all strongly, if that word applies,
> agnostic.  No one said anything like: "I'm  a
> christian and I'm proud of it" 

I'm a Christian and I'm proud of it.  We've gotten a bad rep lately, and it's worse in the RPG subculture.  Sure, the Catholic church has done some terrible, terrible things in its long history, but it's been good for me.  

But we're probably reeling away from topicality at a prodigious rate, so I'll trek back towards UA with a review of "House of Leaves."

I read "House of Leaves" because of the heavy praise it got on this list, but I have to say I wasn't impressed.  I didn't feel ROBBED, the way I did after "Infinite Jest," but the book is something like 770 fucking pages long and -- I'm sorry -- you can get the same effects from reading Thomas Ligotti's novella "The Shadow, The Darkness" and then watching "The Blair Witch Project."  

At the risk of editorializing, I got the feeling that Danielewski really, really wanted to write a big, sticky Gothic haunted house story... but he just couldn't bring himself to do it.  Afraid he'd get hairy palms or (more likely) sneering from David Foster Wallace and other ponytailed literary authorities.  So he makes it all "metanarrative," see?  'Cause it's not a haunted house story, no, see, it's got this editor publishing this text from "Johnny Truant" who got this OTHER text from this guy called Zampano, and THAT text is about a movie by this guy named Navidson.  (There is, of course, copious commentary on the Navidson text by Zampano and other authorities, along with commentary on Zampano by Truant and on Truant by his unnamed publisher.)  

So you have to wade through reams of footnotes.  Wow.  Innovative.  Also, the word "House" is always printed in blue ink.  I get chills.

Johnny Truant doesn't persuade me.  I don't read him as a free-fucking druggie autodidact.  I read him as "free-fucking druggie autodidact as envisioned by someone with at least a M.A. in Comparative Literature."

The Whalestoe Letters are a good juicy bit, tucked back there in an appendix, but you can buy them without the other 600+ pages of the book -- which, right there, seems a little screwy to me.  

Finally, my biggest real complaint about "House of Leaves" is that it violates something I got told in seventh grade about creative writing: Show, don't tell.  A surprising amount of this book worked out (for me, anyhow) to be someone telling you that something had been described.  That is, Zampano talking about how brilliantly Navidson had "depicted pure darkness" -- without any explanation of just how he did it.

The actual Zampano text -- that is, the sticky gothic horror story itself -- isn't bad.  But by and large, I'd say "House of Leaves" spends 550 pages telling you how scared you're GOING to be, and another 50 telling how scared you just WERE.

-G.

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